Bamana "Zig-Zag" Figure, Mali

Pierre Vérité, Paris
Maurice and Fanny Car, Maryland, acquired from the above in February, 1960
By descent to the present owners

One of the most well-known sculptural idioms in African art is the corpus of the antelope and other zoomorphic headcrest figures used by the Bamana chi wara power association.  Distinct from this corpus are an extremely small number of headcrest figures of anthropo-zoomorphic iconography combining an elongated multi-segmented zigzag body in vertical orientation with a humanoid head and two long zoomorphic ears.  This type has recently been identified as a headdress accompanying ton performances of a dance known as nama tyétyé (LaGamma 2002: 121, with reference to Pascal James Imparato).  Three comparable sculptures are known: one in the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg (inv. no. "11.1.469", acquired from Leo Frobenius), a second previously in the collection of Gaston de Havenon, New York (published in Museum of African Art 1971: fig. 59), and a third, widely-published example previously in the collections of Charles Ratton and William Rubin and sold at Sotheby's New York, May 11, 2012. According to LaGamma (2002: 121): "The zigzag motif has been interpreted by some scholars of Bamana culture as having great symbolic resonance, such as an illustration of the trajectory of the Sun around Earth. Zahan notes that this is referred to by the Bamana as tle ka sira gondi, or 'the zigzag path of the sun.' The motif also relates to mathematical methods used by Bamana and Dogon to represent geometrically, and to transpose onto a flat surface, empirically observed spiral motions of heavenly bodies. On another level, the zigzag has been described as a metaphor for accounts of epic journeys. Solange de Ganay notes that in the past, ideas of how Bamana culture heroes traveled through heaven and Earth within the sphere of cosmic space were so precise and detailed that diagrams were made to illustrate their passage. In these traditions, Faro, who put the created world in order and Mousi Koroni, the wife of the creator, are regarded as both complementary and antagonistic elements. According to de Ganay, the zigzag line was sometimes used to represent their journeys as well as the path of the planet Venus."

Scholars have noted the affinity of the stacked vertical "zig-zag" bodies of these figures to the work of 20th century western sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi (FitzGerald 2012: 52).